Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, "Geodesy" to "Geometry" / Volume 11, Slice 6

by Various

The great outburst of Mahommedan conquest in the 7th century was followed by the Arab civilization, having its centres at Bagdad and Cordova, in connexion with which geography again received a share of attention. The works of the ancient The Arabs. Greek geographers were translated into Arabic, and starting with a sound basis of theoretical knowledge, exploration once more made progress. From the 9th to the 13th century intelligent Arab travellers wrote accounts of what they had seen and heard in distant lands. The earliest Arabian traveller whose observations have come down to us is the merchant Sulaiman, who embarked in the Persian Gulf and made several voyages to India and China, in the middle of the 9th century. Abu Zaid also wrote on India, and his work is the most important that we possess before the epoch-making discoveries of Marco Polo. Masudi, a great traveller who knew from personal experience all the countries between Spain and China, described the plains, mountains and seas, the dynasties and peoples, in his Meadows of Gold, an abstract made by himself of his larger work News of the Time. He died in 956, and was known, from the comprehensiveness of his survey, as the Pliny of the East. Amongst his contemporaries were Istakhri, who travelled through all the Mahommedan countries and wrote his Book of Climates in 950, and Ibn Haukal, whose Book of Roads and Kingdoms, based on the work of Istakhri, was written in 976. Idrisi, the best known of the Arabian geographical authors, after travelling far and wide in the first half of the 12th century, settled in Sicily, where he wrote a treatise descriptive of an armillary sphere which he had constructed for Roger II., the Norman king, and in this work he incorporated all accessible results of contemporary travel.

The Northmen of Denmark and Norway, whose piratical adventures were the terror of all the coasts of Europe, and who established themselves in Great Britain and Ireland, in France and Sicily, were also geographical explorers in their rough but The Northmen. practical way during the darkest period of the middle ages. All Northmen were not bent on rapine and plunder; many were peaceful merchants. Alfred the Great, king of the Saxons in England, not only educated his people in the learning of the past ages; he inserted in the geographical works he translated many narratives of the travel of his own time. Thus he placed on record the voyages of the merchant Ulfsten in the Baltic, including particulars of the geography of Germany. And in particular he told of the remarkable voyage of Other, a Norwegian of Helgeland, who was the first authentic Arctic explorer, the first to tell of the rounding of the North Cape and the sight of the midnight sun. This voyage of the middle of the 9th century deserves to be held in happy memory, for it unites the first Norwegian polar explorer with the first English collector of travels. Scandinavian merchants brought the products of India to England and Ireland. From the 8th to the 11th century a commercial route from India passed through Novgorod to the Baltic, and Arabian coins found in Sweden, and particularly in the island of Gotland, prove how closely the enterprise of the Northmen and of the Arabs intertwined. Five-sixths of these coins preserved at Stockholm were from the mints of the Samanian dynasty, which reigned in Khorasan and Transoxiana from about A.D. 900 to 1000. It was the trade with the East that originally gave importance to the city of Visby in Gotland.

In the end of the 9th century Iceland was colonized from Norway; and about 985 the intrepid viking, Eric the Red, discovered Greenland, and induced some of his Icelandic countrymen to settle on its inhospitable shores. His son, Leif Ericsson, and others of his followers were concerned in the discovery of the North American coast (see [Vinland]), which, but for the isolation of Iceland from the centres of European awakening, would have had momentous consequences. As things were, the importance of this discovery passed unrecognized. The story of two Venetians, Nicolo and Antonio Zeno, who gave a vague account of voyages in the northern seas in the end of the 13th century, is no longer to be accepted as history.

At length the long period of barbarism which accompanied and followed the fall of the Roman empire drew to a close in Europe. The Crusades had a favourable influence on the intellectual state of the Western nations. Interesting regions, Close of the dark ages. known only by the scant reports of pilgrims, were made the objects of attention and study; while religious zeal, and the hope of gain, combined with motives of mere curiosity, induced several persons to travel by land into remote regions of the East, far beyond the countries to which the operations of the crusaders extended. Among these was Benjamin of Tudela, who set out from Spain in 1160, travelled by land to Constantinople, and having visited India and some of the eastern islands, returned to Europe by way of Egypt after an absence of thirteen years.

Joannes de Plano Carpini, a Franciscan monk, was the head of one of the missions despatched by Pope Innocent to call the chief and people of the Tatars to a better mind. He reached the headquarters of Batu, on the Volga, in February Asiatic journeys. 1246; and, after some stay, went on to the camp of the great khan near Karakorum in central Asia, and returned safely in the autumn of 1247. A few years afterwards, a Fleming named Rubruquis was sent on a similar mission, and had the merit of being the first traveller of this era who gave a correct account of the Caspian Sea. He ascertained that it had no outlet. At nearly the same time Hayton, king of Armenia, made a journey to Karakorum in 1254, by a route far to the north of that followed by Carpini and Rubruquis. He was treated with honour and hospitality, and returned by way of Samarkand and Tabriz, to his own territory. The curious narrative of King Hayton was translated by Klaproth.

While the republics of Italy, and above all the state of Venice, were engaged in distributing the rich products of India and the Far East over the Western world, it was impossible that motives of curiosity, as well as a desire of commercial advantage, should not be awakened to such a degree as to impel some of the merchants to visit those remote lands. Among these were the brothers Polo, who traded with the East and themselves visited Tatary. The recital of their travels fired the youthful imagination of young Marco Polo, son of Nicolo, and he set out for the court of Kublai Khan, with his father and uncle, in 1265. Marco remained for seventeen years in the service of the Great Khan, and was employed on many important missions. Besides what he learnt from his own observation, he collected much information from others concerning countries which he did not visit. He returned to Europe possessed of a vast store of knowledge respecting the eastern parts of the world, and, being afterwards made a prisoner by the Genoese, he dictated the narrative of his travels during his captivity. The work of Marco Polo is the most valuable narrative of travels that appeared during the middle ages, and despite a cold reception and many denials of the accuracy of the record, its substantial truthfulness has been abundantly proved.

Missionaries continued to do useful geographical work. Among them were John of Monte Corvino, a Franciscan monk, Andrew of Perugia, John Marignioli and Friar Jordanus, who visited the west coast of India, and above all Friar Odoric of Pordenone. Odoric set out on his travels about 1318, and his journeys embraced parts of India, the Malay Archipelago, China and even Tibet, where he was the first European to enter Lhasa, not yet a forbidden city.

Ibn Batuta, the great Arab traveller, is separated by a wide space of time from his countrymen already mentioned, and he finds his proper place in a chronological notice after the days of Marco Polo, for he did not begin his wanderings until 1325, his career thus coinciding in time with the fabled journeyings of Sir John Mandeville. While Arab learning flourished during the darkest ages of European ignorance, the last of the Arab geographers lived to see the dawn of the great period of the European awakening. Ibn Batuta went by land from Tangier to Cairo, then visited Syria, and performed the pilgrimages to Medina and Mecca. After exploring Persia, and again residing for some time at Mecca, he made a voyage down the Red sea to Yemen, and travelled through that country to Aden. Thence he visited the African coast, touching at Mombasa and Quiloa, and then sailed across to Ormuz and the Persian Gulf. He crossed Arabia from Bahrein to Jidda, traversed the Red sea and the desert to Syene, and descended the Nile to Cairo. After this he revisited Syria and Asia Minor, and crossed the Black sea, the desert from Astrakhan to Bokhara, and the Hindu Kush. He was in the service of Muhammad Tughluk, ruler of Delhi, about eight years, and was sent on an embassy to China, in the course of which the ambassadors sailed down the west coast of India to Calicut, and then visited the Maldive Islands and Ceylon. Ibn Batuta made the voyage through the Malay Archipelago to China, and on his return he proceeded from Malabar to Bagdad and Damascus, ultimately reaching Fez, the capital of his native country, in November 1349. After a journey into Spain he set out once more for Central Africa in 1352, and reached Timbuktu and the Niger, returning to Fez in 1353. His narrative was committed to writing from his dictation.

The European country which had come the most completely under the influence of Arab culture now began to send forth explorers to distant lands, though the impulse came not from the Moors but from Italian merchant navigators in Spanish Spanish exploration. service. The peaceful reign of Henry III. of Castile is famous for the attempts of that prince to extend the diplomatic relations of Spain to the remotest parts of the earth. He sent embassies to all the princes of Christendom and to the Moors. In 1403 the Spanish king sent a knight of Madrid, Ruy Gonzalez de Clavijo, to the distant court of Timur, at Samarkand. He returned in 1406, and wrote a valuable narrative of his travels.